DS9 S1E05: Babel
Aug. 20th, 2024 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marchionessofmustacheSo, I watched this a couple days ago on the couch, and I'm just now getting around to writing the entry for it. I'm going to be following along Memory Alpha's entry for it to make sure I remember the order of events.
So, I did a dumb and read the episode description on Para+ before watching, which spoiled a few key points of the episode that I had forgotten from my years-ago watch of this one. Lesson learned!
I kinda procrastinated on this one because the thumbnail on P+ and TrekCore were BOTH O'Brien and I was like "wah wah I don't want to watch an O'Brien episodeeeee" but it really wasn't so bad.
The episode opens up with O'Brien being very busy, with stuff all around the station messing up and him being called to fix it. Seems like the station is extra messed up today! Nothing seems to be working. And he's all fatigued and stuff. One of the main points is that the replicators (the things the food comes from) are messed up. So he goes to start working on fixing them. He fixes one of them and orders a coffee (black, double sweet) to see if it's working. And then the camera pans over to inside the mechanics and shows some kind of dubious device attached to the inside of the replicator.
DUN DUN DUNNNNNN!!!
Well, I read the description so I already know what this is and who put it there and what it does and everything. That's like, half the mystery of the episode :)
We then are taken to Quark's on the promenade. This alien dude is mad that his stew or soup or something tastes bad and starts to try to force-feed it to Quark, but Odo steps in and pulls him away. I like how Odo and Kira and friends are quick to use force to solve their problems; in TNG they would have tried negotiating with the alien the entire time until Quark had downed the entire bowl of soup, then STILL tried to talk to him afterward. Odo sees his 'buddy' in a minor bit of trouble and first thing he does is forcefully grab the guy away.
Kira and Jadzia have a little chat about how she has to get used to "being female" again after 80 years... she seems to be referring to getting glances and enthusiastic greetings from strange men. Kira says something about how it must be uncomfortable and Jadzia says she likes the attention lol. I guess in the 24th century, it might not be as unsettling to have strange men looking at you and stuff? Like it might be more innocent and not as cat-cally? I don't know. It seems to NOT be pleasant to Kira, though. But she's also a bit of a grump.
O'Brien fixes some more replicators, but while talking to Sisky, he suddenly becomes incapable of proper communication -- he just says random words and doesn't seem to know what anyone else is saying to him, either. We head to sick bay, where there doesn't seem to be anything immediately wrong with him, but he's still communicating all weird, even when he tries typing, it comes up as the gibberish in the above screenshot. Julian concludes it's some kind of aphasia, and after Jadzia develops it, too, he discovers a virus causing some kind of neural network mixup in their brains or something.
DUN DUN DUNNNNN
Quark seems to have revived his business despite the broken replicators and Sisko's quarantine after Jadzia's illness -- come to find out he's using a replicator from a command quarters illegally to gather and serve food on the promenade. You know, where the strange device was.
Meanwhile we've been seeing this old guy who is increasingly impatient about leaving. He has a ship with perishable goods on it that he MUST deliver, but with the ship being quarantined it seems like that's not happening any time soon.
Sisky thinks the replicators are spreading the virus, and then Odo informs them that Quark's been using the command-level replicators to serve food, so now the whole ship is getting the virus. A quick scan shows that the virus has mutated to become airborne; the whole station is now infected.
Kira finds the mysterious device from before and discovers that it's been creating the virus and implanting it directly into the food source.
Long story short, the virus is getting worse and more and more people are getting infected (it seems to have different time spans on how it affects each person though) and come to find out it's even worse -- people will start dying. The earliest infected victim, O'Brien, only has 12 hours to live.
I don't know at what point we learned, but at first we thought it must be some kind of Cardassian terrorism plot, but it turns out that the device was actually a Bajoran terrorist device meant to attack the Cardassians back in the day, but it never went off because... reasons, and somehow during the fixing of the replicators, O'Brien accidentally fixed it and activated it.
But yeah, from reading the description, I learned that it was an aphasia-causing virus from a Bajoran terrorist trap ^_^ So like half the episode's mystery was spoiled. But from here on out there's no more mystery on that front.
Kira tries to find out the person who originally made the virus so she can figure out if they have an antidote. Long story short, he didn't make one, and he's dead. lol.
So instead of finding him, she finds the one guy who somewhat collaborated with him, who doesn't want to have anything to do with her as soon as she mentions the virus, claiming he knows nothing to do with it, and cuts off all communication with her.
So she kidnaps him and infects him with the virus so he's forced to cooperate. Thing is, he really DOESN'T know an antidote, and is tasked with creating one.
Meanwhile, almost everyone in the ship is infected except a few people. Eventually it comes down to crazy impatient guy, Quark, Odo, Kira, and kidnapped guy.
Impatient guy refuses to listen to reason and tries to force his ship out of lock by turning on thrusters, which is going to rip his ship apart and explode it, causing severe damage to the station. Quark transports Odo to the docking bay where he manually ejects the ship with only seconds to go before destruction. Meanwhile, kidnapped guy and Kira are working on Julian's research into the virus to discover a cure. Thankfully the guy knows JUST enough to develop a cure at the last minute and save everyone. Hooray!
It doesn't even explain how he made it or administered it or anything. It's just like "And thus, everyone was good again and no one died!"
The episode ends with a little gag of everything being back to normal -- including the replicators being wonky and making the coffee too hot, at which Sisko yells at O'Brien. Wah wah wahhhh teehee.
Overall an... OK episode. Kira kidnapping the dude was pretty cool. And Quark and Odo being the only two on the bridge was pretty funny. I'm not sure how aphasia actually works but typing out nonsense words that are still complete words seems a little... implausible? But maybe that's really how it works! They kinda explained aphasia so if it really works by, essentially, jumbling your lexical network, it would really work like that, I guess. It just seems weird and kinda cringe when they're just yelling out nonsense. Maybe it's more the acting lol.
I like how we're continuing to develop Quark and Odo's relationship as well. They cause so much trouble for each other, but like Quark said, maybe they really are the closest thing each other has to a friend. I don't like, romantically ship them, but I do like to think they are secretly bros who can't admit it to themsleves.
I wish they would have elongated the 'this is a Cardassian plot!' idea a little longer, so there'd be more surprise to it being a Bajoran mechanism, but then the episode would have dragged on too long or lost some of its later excitement time, so I guess they couldn't have done that.
No cries but definitely some hype moments that had me bouncing in my chair lmao. Well, on the couch. I guess I wasn't in a chair for this one. And on the couch I kinda wriggle more than bounce when I get excited. Mostly the Kira badassery and Odo and Quark having to work together.
Cry Count: 6
MASTERPOST
So, I did a dumb and read the episode description on Para+ before watching, which spoiled a few key points of the episode that I had forgotten from my years-ago watch of this one. Lesson learned!
I kinda procrastinated on this one because the thumbnail on P+ and TrekCore were BOTH O'Brien and I was like "wah wah I don't want to watch an O'Brien episodeeeee" but it really wasn't so bad.
The episode opens up with O'Brien being very busy, with stuff all around the station messing up and him being called to fix it. Seems like the station is extra messed up today! Nothing seems to be working. And he's all fatigued and stuff. One of the main points is that the replicators (the things the food comes from) are messed up. So he goes to start working on fixing them. He fixes one of them and orders a coffee (black, double sweet) to see if it's working. And then the camera pans over to inside the mechanics and shows some kind of dubious device attached to the inside of the replicator.
DUN DUN DUNNNNNN!!!
Well, I read the description so I already know what this is and who put it there and what it does and everything. That's like, half the mystery of the episode :)
We then are taken to Quark's on the promenade. This alien dude is mad that his stew or soup or something tastes bad and starts to try to force-feed it to Quark, but Odo steps in and pulls him away. I like how Odo and Kira and friends are quick to use force to solve their problems; in TNG they would have tried negotiating with the alien the entire time until Quark had downed the entire bowl of soup, then STILL tried to talk to him afterward. Odo sees his 'buddy' in a minor bit of trouble and first thing he does is forcefully grab the guy away.
Kira and Jadzia have a little chat about how she has to get used to "being female" again after 80 years... she seems to be referring to getting glances and enthusiastic greetings from strange men. Kira says something about how it must be uncomfortable and Jadzia says she likes the attention lol. I guess in the 24th century, it might not be as unsettling to have strange men looking at you and stuff? Like it might be more innocent and not as cat-cally? I don't know. It seems to NOT be pleasant to Kira, though. But she's also a bit of a grump.
O'Brien fixes some more replicators, but while talking to Sisky, he suddenly becomes incapable of proper communication -- he just says random words and doesn't seem to know what anyone else is saying to him, either. We head to sick bay, where there doesn't seem to be anything immediately wrong with him, but he's still communicating all weird, even when he tries typing, it comes up as the gibberish in the above screenshot. Julian concludes it's some kind of aphasia, and after Jadzia develops it, too, he discovers a virus causing some kind of neural network mixup in their brains or something.
DUN DUN DUNNNNN
Quark seems to have revived his business despite the broken replicators and Sisko's quarantine after Jadzia's illness -- come to find out he's using a replicator from a command quarters illegally to gather and serve food on the promenade. You know, where the strange device was.
Meanwhile we've been seeing this old guy who is increasingly impatient about leaving. He has a ship with perishable goods on it that he MUST deliver, but with the ship being quarantined it seems like that's not happening any time soon.
Sisky thinks the replicators are spreading the virus, and then Odo informs them that Quark's been using the command-level replicators to serve food, so now the whole ship is getting the virus. A quick scan shows that the virus has mutated to become airborne; the whole station is now infected.
Kira finds the mysterious device from before and discovers that it's been creating the virus and implanting it directly into the food source.
Long story short, the virus is getting worse and more and more people are getting infected (it seems to have different time spans on how it affects each person though) and come to find out it's even worse -- people will start dying. The earliest infected victim, O'Brien, only has 12 hours to live.
I don't know at what point we learned, but at first we thought it must be some kind of Cardassian terrorism plot, but it turns out that the device was actually a Bajoran terrorist device meant to attack the Cardassians back in the day, but it never went off because... reasons, and somehow during the fixing of the replicators, O'Brien accidentally fixed it and activated it.
But yeah, from reading the description, I learned that it was an aphasia-causing virus from a Bajoran terrorist trap ^_^ So like half the episode's mystery was spoiled. But from here on out there's no more mystery on that front.
Kira tries to find out the person who originally made the virus so she can figure out if they have an antidote. Long story short, he didn't make one, and he's dead. lol.
So instead of finding him, she finds the one guy who somewhat collaborated with him, who doesn't want to have anything to do with her as soon as she mentions the virus, claiming he knows nothing to do with it, and cuts off all communication with her.
So she kidnaps him and infects him with the virus so he's forced to cooperate. Thing is, he really DOESN'T know an antidote, and is tasked with creating one.
Meanwhile, almost everyone in the ship is infected except a few people. Eventually it comes down to crazy impatient guy, Quark, Odo, Kira, and kidnapped guy.
Impatient guy refuses to listen to reason and tries to force his ship out of lock by turning on thrusters, which is going to rip his ship apart and explode it, causing severe damage to the station. Quark transports Odo to the docking bay where he manually ejects the ship with only seconds to go before destruction. Meanwhile, kidnapped guy and Kira are working on Julian's research into the virus to discover a cure. Thankfully the guy knows JUST enough to develop a cure at the last minute and save everyone. Hooray!
It doesn't even explain how he made it or administered it or anything. It's just like "And thus, everyone was good again and no one died!"
The episode ends with a little gag of everything being back to normal -- including the replicators being wonky and making the coffee too hot, at which Sisko yells at O'Brien. Wah wah wahhhh teehee.
Overall an... OK episode. Kira kidnapping the dude was pretty cool. And Quark and Odo being the only two on the bridge was pretty funny. I'm not sure how aphasia actually works but typing out nonsense words that are still complete words seems a little... implausible? But maybe that's really how it works! They kinda explained aphasia so if it really works by, essentially, jumbling your lexical network, it would really work like that, I guess. It just seems weird and kinda cringe when they're just yelling out nonsense. Maybe it's more the acting lol.
I like how we're continuing to develop Quark and Odo's relationship as well. They cause so much trouble for each other, but like Quark said, maybe they really are the closest thing each other has to a friend. I don't like, romantically ship them, but I do like to think they are secretly bros who can't admit it to themsleves.
I wish they would have elongated the 'this is a Cardassian plot!' idea a little longer, so there'd be more surprise to it being a Bajoran mechanism, but then the episode would have dragged on too long or lost some of its later excitement time, so I guess they couldn't have done that.
No cries but definitely some hype moments that had me bouncing in my chair lmao. Well, on the couch. I guess I wasn't in a chair for this one. And on the couch I kinda wriggle more than bounce when I get excited. Mostly the Kira badassery and Odo and Quark having to work together.
Cry Count: 6
no subject
Date: 2024-08-20 07:58 pm (UTC)Quark would not adhere to COVID-19 protocols.
Old Impatient Man was a total red herring. I expected him to be involved, especially since he was willing to die to get away, but nah. Ends up he was just impatient and stupid.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-21 12:32 am (UTC)Yeah imaptient dude was more there to cause EXTRA turmoil I guess XD Give Quark and Odo something to do.
I wonder if Odo was immune to the virus, being that he's not actually humanoid? I would assume so.
Quark mentioned something about Ferengi having a particularly strong immune system, so he probably was just one of the very last to develop symptoms?
Can't be getting sick when there's MONEY to be made!
no subject
Date: 2024-08-21 04:49 pm (UTC)~Capitalism~. Sounds like my job's motto haha. I swear if I died they'd show up at my funeral and remind my casket that my PTO will run out soon.